Geoff Schiller is the Chief Sales Officer at Hearst Digital Media and the President of 212, New York’s interactive advertising club. We recently spoke with Geoff about his new role and upcoming initiatives.

The Makegood: Geoff, congratulations to your recent promotion to the Chief Sales Officer at Hearst Digital Media. What are your new goals in this role?

My tenure at Hearst Digital Media has given me the opportunity to work closely with our team to present innovative and creative ad solutions to our clients…the goal is to double down on this approach as we move forward. What we’ve done at Hearst Digital Media is unparalleled in the digital publishing world and our success can be credited to the group’s ability to market and monetize this amazing portfolio to its fullest potential…I expect that to continue for many years to come.

The Makegood: Kristine Welker, HDM’s chief revenue officer, states that you have done an incredible job of creating a culture that inspires people to work even harder to surpass the previous year’s efforts. How do you do that?

Taking a page from your first question…it’s about goal-setting and creating a bite-sized approach to how we manage our individual businesses from a salesperson’s point of view while keeping the broader divisional and company goals top of mind. Digging deeply into the revenue #’s helps navigate this approach immensely, at HDM we track a variety of sales-related metrics to ensure we can optimize our individual and collective sales approaches in real-time.

The Makegood: Hearst Magazines has published more than 150 applications and digital editions for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. What are innovative and creative ad solutions for your clients?

Let’s focus on the mobile web – defined as smartphone and tablet web experiences. By the end of 1H of this year our entire portfolio was relaunched in HTML 5. This is important not only to our clients who continue to look for premium mobile scale, but to consumers who want uninterrupted, seamless experiences regardless of device. In addition to providing optimal user experiences, we have in-house design capabilities which allow us to create HTML 5 optimized, rich media mobile web experiences for clients. These units can be custom or our clients can choose from any of the IAB Mobile Rising Stars, as HDM is Rising Star compliant.

The Makegood: In early November, 212 will host the event “Connecting to the Retail Consumer”. How do you think the media will change consumers’ behavior in the retail market?

Typically I leave the insights for the clients we feature on our panels, but if I have to answer your question, I would say that the path to purchase is no longer a linear, purchase funnel-focused journey. Consumers are bombarded by social, mobile, desktop, word of mouth, peer recommendations, etc…so it’s important that publishers provide consumers with the right content, delivered in the right context with marketing solutions baked into their experience to help guide and inform their purchase decisions.